Douglas Carswell

Douglas Carswell was first elected to Parliament in 2005 by a slender 920 votes. He was returned as MP for Clacton in 2010 with a 12,000 majority. He is the author of The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy and believes that the internet is making the world a vastly better place.

Will our next ambassador to Brussels be another fanatical Europhile? The mandarins of SW1 don't think it's any of our business

What do Lord Hannay of Chiswick, Baron Kerr of Kinlochard, Sir Stephen Wall and Sir Nigel Sheinwald all have in common?

Each has served as the UK ambassador to the EU. More than that, once retired, they each revealed themselves to be committed Europhiles, true believers in Brussels. Three of the four currently serve on the Future of Europe Forum, a body set up to keep Britain in the EU at any price.

To full understand why Britain has been dragged deeper into the EU, regardless what promises politicians make, take a look at who we have had negotiating on our behalf.

For the past quarter century, Britain has been represented round the table in Brussels by people personally determined that we should be part of the Eurosystem. It’s not just in the big, set-piece treaty type negotiations where this matters. Every week in Brussels, UK diplomats sit down with other Eurocrats and strike deals that determine public policy in Britain.

No wonder that on everything from fisheries to finance, we always gets such dreadful deals in Brussels.

At the beginning of this year, David Cameron seemed to finally acknowledge just how awful our current terms of membership are. He promised a fundamental renegotiation, followed by an In/Out referendum.

If Mr Cameron is to undo a generation of duff deals in one grand renegotiation, he’ll need a tough negotiator. He will also need someone who not only recognises how bad things are, but who is as personally committed to changing things as their predecessors seem to be to the status quo.

In short, he will need a UK ambassador to the EU who is very different from the Hannay-Kerr-Wall-Sheinwald mold.

With an unexpected vacancy, who is the current favourite to fill the role? Someone called Ivan Rogers, apparently. An ex Chief of Staff to Sir Leon Brittan and former Private Secretary to Ken Clarke, I’m told.

Would Ivan Rogers appointment mean business-as-usual with Brussels or a brave break with what went before?

Despite all that “new-politics-accountable-government” blah blah we heard so much about before the last election, those we elect will not have the chance to ask Mr Rogers before he is handed the role. Government accountability to Parliament, it seems to me, is a fiction.

The mandarins of SW1 who really run this country – and have run it into the ground – do not believe it is any of your business.